In the next lane, the kids cheered her. Two boys, two girls, sixteen or seventeen, double dating. She did a little happy dance back up the lane, then threw her arms around Luke and kissed his cheek. He laughed. God, he smelled good. Soap, not aftershave. Clean. And maybe that was the freshness of rain, too.

He grinned down at her. “And you said bowling was boring.”

“It is when my ball keeps rolling into the gutter.”

“My turn.” With her still in his arms, he whirled on his heel and set her down by the chairs. “Watch a pro.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. At first she was just going to pretend for him, because she was so good at faking. Somehow the pretending had ended, and she’d started having fun. Real fun. Unselfconscious fun. He never got mad when she blew it. He simply scrunched up behind her, wrapped his body around hers, and demonstrated how to do it right. Who’d have thought learning to bowl would be so sexy.

Luke picked up his ball, aimed, wriggled his ass temptingly, then strode to the lane and let the ball fly. And struck out. Or was that making a strike? She couldn’t remember. Whatever. He got them all. She didn’t understand exactly how the electronic scoring worked, but obviously he was way ahead.

“You cheated,” she called out, just for the hell of it. “And I want pizza.” The sausage and pepperoni smelled heavenly, almost as good as Luke.

He grinned, sidling up beside her, leaning close. “You’re talking to your master, show some respect,” he murmured, then cupped her nape and planted one on her mouth.

It was so good. She felt so normal. So special. She’d told him to treat her like a queen, and in the oddest way, he had. “Buy me some pizza, and I’ll show you some respect.”

“Don’t cheat while I’m gone,” he said, “Or you will be punished.” Fishing out his wallet, he headed to pizza heaven.

“You’re the cheater,” she called after him, a delicious little thrill running through her at the thought of any punishment he might mete out later. Then she sashayed down to get a ball. He’d showed her the moves, the positions. Most of the time, she hit the gutter, but sometimes she actually hit the pins. And he didn’t care either way. Maybe if they’d been playing on a team or against another couple, he would have hated losing, but since it was just them, he was fine.

Bree hadn’t enjoyed herself this much since . . . Well, she’d never enjoyed herself this much. She’d never let herself go, never acted the idiot, jumping up and down. She’d never had plain old fun. She hated looking stupid. If anyone from work saw her antics, they’d actually have to do a double take to be sure it was her.

She lined herself up, held the ball the way Luke had shown her. Okay, okay, ready; she let it roll.

She didn’t care what anyone else thought of her. Not tonight. Because Luke had given her something special. This was different than sex. Sex was a maze you had to negotiate to get what you needed. Sometimes you made a wrong turn and got screwed. Sometimes the prize at the center wasn’t what you’d wanted or needed. Luke made bowling fun because he didn’t expect anything. He didn’t criticize; instead he laughed. She didn’t have to be the one to make sure he was pleased. He seemed to do that all on his own.

The ball rolled and wobbled. And fell off into the gutter again. She stamped her foot. She’d been thinking too much.

Next door, the girl’s ball flopped into the gutter right on the heels of Bree’s, and the two balls rolled down to the bottom of the lanes together. The pretty petite blonde shrugged, laughed back at her friends, then looked at Bree and said, “I guess we’re losers.”

“Double losers,” the two boys called, holding up thumbs and fingers against their foreheads in double Ls.

The girl giggled and ran back to bump hips with her date.

Bree had never been like that girl. She had never laughed at herself.

Luke wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her back hard and tight against him, surprising an oomph out of her.

“You scared me,” she complained. But she liked the date. She liked pretending they were normal people. She’d never been normal, and it was nice, for once, to feel what it might have been like if she was.

“Pizza will be ready in fifteen minutes. You want to eat out here or back there?”

“Will we lose our lane?”

“Probably.”

“Then let’s eat out here.” She didn’t want to miss a moment. It was already seven, her clock was ticking, and pretty soon she’d turn back into Cinderella’s ugly stepsister again. Okay, it wasn’t quite the way the fairy tale went, but the point was that everything good eventually ended. She wanted this for now. She wanted Luke now. Not sex, just this, his laughter, his kisses, his touches.

“Who’s winning?” she said bouncing on the toes of her bowling shoes. Bree had never bounced in her life. Now, for tonight, she couldn’t stop.

Luke gave her a duh look.

They played, and she kept falling further behind his score, but she didn’t care. When the pizza came, she ate three pieces until she thought she’d burst it was so good. She licked the sauce from her fingers.

“You’ve got it all over your mouth,” Luke admonished and kissed it away. He stole her breath at the same time.

When she looked at her watch next, it was eight. She didn’t want the night to end. She wanted to absorb how it felt to have fun, so she’d remember later. It was too soon to go back.

Then it was eight-thirty. Tick, tick, tick. The hospice volunteer wasn’t staying all night.

Luke tipped her chin up. “We can take the long way home.”

“We don’t have to,” she said as she gave up her bowling shoes and slipped back into her high heels.

Outside, it was still raining. Beneath his umbrella, they awkwardly ran to the car, Luke getting wetter than her. Once inside, he turned on the seat warmers, then slashed the wipers across the windshield.

“I changed my mind,” she whispered. “I want the long way.”

Luke had never seen her like this. He couldn’t have dreamed it was possible. She was a different woman in the bowling alley, childlike. Happy. That was a word he never would have applied to her.

But that woman was fading fast. He was sure she was thinking that soon she had to return to her father’s house. He’d pulled into an empty lot at the county park, tuned the car radio to a jazz station, then they both moved to the backseat to watch the rain streaking the windshield. The jazz softly filled the car, blending with the rain’s patter on the roof to create a symphony.

He wanted her. He’d intended a no-sex date, a way to change their pattern. But he wanted sex with the woman he’d met in the bowling alley.

“Kiss me.” It sounded like an order, but if she could have seen into his heart, she’d have known he was begging.

She shifted in the seat next to him and bent to put her lips to his cock through his jeans.

He pulled her up. “Not there.” Cupping her nape, he held her close, waiting, his breath stalled in his chest. His beating heart added to the symphony of rain and jazz.

They’d done all manner of kinky perversions, but kissing was rare. Sometimes, he’d have killed for it. Like now. Her lips were a luscious red, the color natural for her. She hadn’t replaced her lipstick after the pizza.

“Kissing like teenagers in the backseat of your dad’s Chevy,” she murmured.

She’d read his mind. They were in tune. “Yeah. The perfect end to bowling night.”

Her soft laugh burrowed beneath his skin. “All right,” she said. “But I’m not going past first base.”

Again, he marveled. She was so different tonight; a woman without shadows. “We’ll see how far I can get you to go after you kiss me.”

“Oh, so like you’re so good I’ll change my mind?” she mocked.

“I’m a great kisser.”

She turned things around on him. “Prove it.”

He started slow, lightly tracing her lips with his tongue, then parting them, tasting, delving deeper. She smelled like baby powder and raindrops. The music wound around them, seduced him as much as her kiss did. The fall of her hair caressed his hand as he held her to him, the texture like fine threads of silk.

He knew what he wanted for the night, what he needed. Slipping his hand between her legs, he caressed the crease of her jeans. She was warm down there.

Bree pulled him back out. “No, no, no, that’s a bad boy,” she whispered against his lips.

“But I want it.” He tried the same move, but she clamped her legs against him. Wrapping her hair around his hand, he pulled her head back. “Let me in.”

Her eyes shone darkly. “Not tonight.”

He wanted her to want his touch, to need the orgasm he could give her, the pleasure. “Don’t make me force you.”

She pursed her lips. He felt the M in Master coming, and as much as he enjoyed the kinky stuff, he didn’t want to be her master tonight.

Instead he kissed her, taking her with his tongue, pushing her head back until she moaned into his mouth. The nipples of her small breasts were jewel-hard beneath her jacket. He rubbed his chest against her as he deepened the kiss. She tasted of spice and laughter, a heretofore unknown quality in her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and threw herself into the kiss, angling her head, threading her fingers through his hair to hold him. It was as if she ravished his mouth, licking, tasting, nipping his lips, then going deep. She’d never kissed him like that before. It drove him wild and yet the most tender of feelings blossomed inside him. The sweetness and purity of just a kiss, nothing more, yet the undeniably carnal nature of the taking turned him inside out.

He kissed her until he couldn’t breathe, until his heart raced and his ears roared and her moans sounded as if they came from his own chest.

Then he pulled away, touched his fingers to her kiss-swollen lips. “Who taught you to kiss like that?” he murmured.

“You did.”

He believed her.

“It’s time to go,” she said, leaning in to nip the flesh of his throat.

He didn’t want her to leave. He knew the woman she was in the bowling alley, even the woman she’d become in the backseat of his car, would disappear. He may never find her again. But the dash clock flipped over to nine-forty-five, and ten o’clock was her witching hour.

“We will do this again,” he said before he let her climb back into the front seat.

“A date?” she asked.

The laughter, the fun, the kiss. “Yes, a date.”

“Some things you can have only once. If you try to duplicate perfection, it gets all screwed up and ruined,” she said.

He’d always known she had a dim view of relationships, shadows from her past, but she was wrong about him, wrong about them together. And he would prove it. “We’ll have other dates, Bree. A lot of them.”

“Yes, Master,” she answered softly before he could anticipate and stop her. He didn’t want to turn it into an order or a demand.

But with those words, the night and the woman she’d been disappeared completely.